Cory Doctorow: Europe looks like it may be getting the courage to take on Apple, mandating that consumers have a right to repair their phones
That would be a big threat to Apple’s revenue, as the company depends on customers replacing worn out phones when Apple deems the pocket-fondles are beyond repair.
The Last Alternative: A 1978 Soviet TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov's "The Naked Sun"
Monday, March 9, 2020
Cheesy even by 1978 standards, according to this fellow on Reddit. On YouTube: here and here and here I gave it a quick peek and can confirm its cheesiness. It’s in Russian, no subtitles, so I didn’t watch. I don’t speak Russian.
Old age is very different today, when the average lifespan is 79, than at the turn of the 20th century, when it was 49. It’s a new stage of life, like adolescence emerged 70 or so years ago.
An interview with Louise Aronson, author of the book “Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life." From the book description on Amazon:
For more than 5,000 years, “old” has been defined as beginning between the ages of 60 and 70. That means most people alive today will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, and many will be elders for 40 years or more. Yet at the very moment that humans are living longer than ever before, we’ve made old age into a disease, a condition to be dreaded, denigrated, neglected, and denied.
In the words of Doc Holliday: “I’m in my prime.”
A driver was pulled over with expired 1997 license plate tags. He says he’s been busy
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Coronavirus really is that bad and you should work from home
We watched “Sharpe’s Gold.” I bet the men in the 95th Rifles found Hagman annoying after a couple days. “Enough with the singing,” they said.
How to Tell If You Have the Flu, Coronavirus, or Something Else
I think I had norovirus almost exactly a year ago, after returning from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And I passed the norovirus to Julie. Because you should always bring your spouse a little something when you return from a business trip.
I have been that tourist. It’s why I often patronize Starbucks when I’m out of town.


Minnie found a steak-bone on our walk the other day, and I let her carry it home and work on it in the backyard for a while. “What could go wrong?” I thought. It made her so happy.
She sleeps in my office at night, separated from the rest of the house so she doesn’t terrorize the cats. Putting her to bed is the last thing I do before I go to bed myself, and letting her out is the first thing I do when I wake up.
The next morning, when I went into my office to let Minnie out, I found the answer to the question, “What could go wrong?”
Fortunately, she got it all on the mat in front of my desk – bless her! Easy clean-up. And she was SO happy and friendly and affectionate and excited to be let out of my office. I suspect she was partly trying to distract me to keep me from getting angry – not that I would have – and partly she was just relieved, happy, and excited to be out of my office and away from that awful mess.
I left my office windows open the rest of the morning, to air it out. It was some of Minnie’s best work, there.
Bernie has done fine this far appealing to a radical, burn-it-down revolutionary base. But now he needs to appeal to ALL Democrats or he’ll lose the nomination.
And he’ll have to switch gears again if he gets the nomination, to appeal to that additional fraction of Americans who see him as being just as bad as Trump.
The right to repair is the right to resilience
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Cory on Pluralistic.net: It’s no coincidence that farms and farmers have been leaders in Right to Repair: when you’re isolated and you’re not allowed to fix your stuff, it means that you can neither nip down to the shops for a replacement, nor easily have an authorized repair tech come to your place. Covid can put everyone – even entire nations – into the position of that isolated farmer.

Cory Doctorow on "Right to Repair" and more
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Cory Doctorow talks about how big business and government have taken away your right to repair property you own, how Facebook and other monopolies can be broken up by requiring them by law to interoperate with other services, and other issues related to monopoly control and trustbusting. INTERVIEW WITH THE FIREWALLS DON’T STOP DRAGONS PODCAST Cory and other digital rights advocates can often get branded as socialists. And yet your right to do what you want with your own property is the most fundamental right there is in a capitalist/market economy.

June Lockhart in a wardrobe test for “Lost in Space,” 1965. Via

Ezra Klein: Sanders can’t lead the Democrats if his campaign treats them like the enemy www.vox.com/2020/3/4/…
